I don't normally fly in the west, but I guess I have to now after seeing that Blue Sky scenery!

I don't normally fly in the west, but I guess I have to now after seeing that Blue Sky scenery!

 

I think it actually works best in the southwest, where the beauty comes from the actual geology, not from plant cover or human construction.  I find photo scenery over urban areas or woodlands to be disappointing unless it's something that uses an overlay for autogen or placed objects.

 

The best combination I've seen is SimHeaven scenery for X-Plane combined with World2XPlane data which draws object layers based on openstreetmap data, so in places with good OSM coverage you get both photoreal imagery and real-world accurate object placement to the level of individual buildings.  The effect can be stunning, and I'd love to have widespread availability of this in FSX/P3D.

 

I think it actually works best in the southwest, where the beauty comes from the actual geology, not from plant cover or human construction. I find photo scenery over urban areas or woodlands to be disappointing unless it's something that uses an overlay for autogen or placed objects.

 

Spot on with this comment.  It's great in the SW US, and BlueSky covers that area quite well from SoCal to much of AZ, southern portions of NV and all of Utah, so you can have that coverage for free if you prefer.  Lot's of downloading so patience is required, but very nice results.  I can't recommend BlueSky strongly enough for those who want to get their feet wet trying photo, but aren't sure if they'll like it or not.

 

BTW, your shots drove my flight last night, as I realized I simply had to do a VFR flight through Monarch Pass.  My wx was a bit better than yours for the trip, though. ;-)

 

Scott

What an incredible shot with that .....is it a JS41?

What an incredible shot with that .....is it a JS41?

 

Close!  JS-32.

 

http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/jetstream-p-92.html

 

The image itself is from somewhere around Bern, I can't recall precisely where.

OK, I've been taking a few comparison shots in Utah between Megascenery, UltimateVFR, and BlueSky.   It's late and I'm tired, but I figured I'd post one set.   These are all over Blanding, taken around mid afternoon with clear sky.

 

Megascenery:

 

 

BlueSky:

 

 

Ultimate:

 

 

To my eye, Megascenery comes off distinctly worst, with BlueSky and Ultimate being close.  Mega looks blurry, weirdly color shifted, over-saturated, and under-exposed.  You can maybe just barely see the slight resolution advantage that BlueSky has, but it's minor enough that every other time I look I end up thinking that Ultimate is actually superior there.  Aside from that it the two seem highly comparable.   You could probably decide based on whether you were more interested in the slightly better clarity of BlueSky, if you even saw it, or the autogen of Ultimate.

 

Frankly, I find Megascenery very disappointing here, and that pattern holds up for the rest of the pictures I've taken so far (which I'll clean up and post a little later this week or this weekend).   I took images around the state (here, Salt Lake, Mount Pleasant, Canyonlands) and in all of them Mega ends up looking like a low-rent reproduction to me.  I don't have any other of their scenery to compare to, so maybe Utah is just a bad state for them, but I'm kinda glad I only paid $17 for that package for this comparison. :}

 

 

To my eye, Megascenery comes off distinctly worst, with BlueSky and Ultimate being close. Mega looks blurry, weirdly color shifted, over-saturated, and under-exposed

I fully concur with your observations. When I first looked at Mega, my first thoughts were, thank heavens I've never bought any of their sceneries. I looked that that distant mountain range and I could immediately see the difference.

 

Nice set of test images. Thanks.

Thanks much for the shots and your thoughts.  I use BlueSky for Utah, so can't comment there as far as MSE v2 goes, but in other areas my biggest complaint about them is inconsistency.  I do have MSE v2 Colorado, as MSE was the only one doing CO and it's a classic mixed bag.  Some areas are very good, some are good and some are awful, particularly in the eastern part of the state. 

 

BlueSky, on the other hand, generally does about as good as can be done with the imagery available and includes upgraded mesh and airport correction.  And for the price (donation ware) it can't be beat.  But if Ultimate hangs in there with BlueSky, the addition of vegetation may make it a worthwhile tradeoff.  Think I'll give CO a try and see how things look there.

 

BTW, I also have MS' hi-res city version for Denver and that really is a different story.  It covers the front range cities from parts of Fort Collins all the way south to Pueblo and includes much of the foothills to near the front range peaks to the west and well east of the I25 corridor.  Still some color inconsistency in a few places, but the res is killer and holds up well at lower altitudes.

 

Again, thanks for taking the time and effort to show us these.  Much appreciated!

 

Scott

Have most of the BlueSky scenery and a few pieces of MegaScenery. I had never heard of Ultimate VFR until the other day. Looking at the screen shots (thanks kaosfere for taking the time!) it's pretty obvious that they're all using the same source data. I am intrigued by the 'value add' that Ultimate VFR is doing with the addition of autogen and night lighting. For those who own some Ultimate VFR, are those features a worthy addition or is it more of a selling gimmick? Is there a noticable performance impact with the addition of autogen/lighting?

 

So, a question those familiar - I already have several overlapping states from BlueSky installed on my system that I am perfectly happy with. Would it be possible to purchase those same states from Ultimate VFR (cheap at the current sale price) and overlay the autogen and lighting BGLs onto my BlueSky scenery? Kind of an academic question but I do like the saturation level of the BlueSky a bit more in the screenies - so this might allow me to get the best of both.

But if Ultimate hangs in there with BlueSky, the addition of vegetation may make it a worthwhile tradeoff.  Think I'll give CO a try and see how things look there.

 

Yeah, looking at BlueSky vs what I've seen with Ultimate, I very much appreciate the autogen layer Ultimate provides.  It's probably also worth noting that Ultimate doesn't just do the vegetation -- there's building autogen as well, which is very apparent in the shots I took over Salt Lake City which I'll post later.   I didn't see much or any over Blanding, but as the developer states elsewhere on these fora his building data is acknowledged to be incomplete based upon his sources and software available; he has a plan for improving both his vegetation and building layers.  I have to say I'm impressed with both his openness about the shortcomings, and his comments regarding wanting to provide evolutionary improvements to his product; it could become even better as time goes by if his ambition pans out.  I'm optimistic, and very glad I jumped on these. 

 

(I'm actually thinking about buying Guam even though I don't fly there much, just to have it and support him.)

 

 

Have most of the BlueSky scenery and a few pieces of MegaScenery. I had never heard of Ultimate VFR until the other day. Looking at the screen shots (thanks kaosfere for taking the time!) it's pretty obvious that they're all using the same source data. I am intrigued by the 'value add' that Ultimate VFR is doing with the addition of autogen and night lighting. For those who own some Ultimate VFR, are those features a worthy addition or is it more of a selling gimmick? Is there a noticable performance impact with the addition of autogen/lighting?

 

So, a question those familiar - I already have several overlapping states from BlueSky installed on my system that I am perfectly happy with. Would it be possible to purchase those same states from Ultimate VFR (cheap at the current sale price) and overlay the autogen and lighting BGLs onto my BlueSky scenery? Kind of an academic question but I do like the saturation level of the BlueSky a bit more in the screenies - so this might allow me to get the best of both.

 

Actually, although it's not as apparent when you're looking at these stand-alone, if you load all the images into an image viewer and switch back and forth rapidly between them, it's obvious that MSE, at least, uses different source data.  This is more obvious over Salt Lake City; there are roads present in the other two that aren't in MSE, and it looks as though there are spots where both new buildings have been built and others have been torn down.  I thought about looking at Google's historical images to see which was more recent, but my gut impression from what changed is that MSE is probably older imagery.   I couldn't tell from what I had if BlueSky and Ultimate had different sources, but this was partly because Ultimate's autogen buildings obscured some of the underlying.   One of the things I might do this weekend is run the same comparison but with the Ultimate autogen layer off to see how the underlying images compare in that way.

 

I can also try getting the Ultimate autogen layers working with the BS scenery, that is a very interesting thought.

 

Edit:  One more thing to add to the potential tradeoffs between the three is that, as Scott mentioned, BlueSky also comes with an improved mesh.   I'm already running FSGlobal Ultimate so it doesn't make a real difference to me, but that's another plus for BlueSky if people aren't already using a high-res mesh.

I don't have any of the UltimateVFR states (yet!) but I was able to do this successfully with old Megascenery Earth V1, which used to feature some sparse autogen and V2 which didn't.for the areas of Colorado that the old V1 scenery covered.  In the end I turned it off as it looked pretty ugly.  Don't recall the details, but I think it was as simple as finding the appropriate .bgl's in the old and stuffing them into the new.

 

Scott

Decided to spring for Colorado (to start) so I could see first-hand how the scenery looks and if I can manipulate the extra features/layers... which according to the manual, are created in a manner which should allow this. At the sale price, it's not the cost, it's the bandwidth, disk space and time I need to install that is the limiting factor!

 

FWIW, I separated all the mesh from my BlueSky scenery so i could use it independently of the photoscenery. I subsequently stopped using it all together (the mesh that is) once I purchased a complete USA commercial mesh product so all my USA photoscenery would benefit.

 

 

At the sale price, it's not the cost, it's the bandwidth, disk space and time I need to install that is the limiting factor!

 

Ditto for me.  All that's been stopping me is the time it'd take to DL (even at my 50 M speeds) and the disk space as my 1TB photo scenery drive is getting a bit full.

 

 

 

FWIW, I separated all the mesh from my BlueSky scenery so i could use it independently of the photoscenery.

 

I took the same approach for AZ.  I purchased AZ from MSE as BlueSky didn't cover the whole state, but wanted to take advantage of BlueSky's mesh in the areas they covered.

 

Scott